This is an Anne Rice adaptation, remember, so there is no shortage of deep lore. The film it could have been, had the filmmakers known what a precious opportunity they had to let Aaliyah shine in this role, and had they delved into the rich backstory of the character. Maybe that's the thing I love the most about Queen of the Damned. The body of work Aaliyah left behind hints at the exceptional talent she would have gone on to develop even further given the chance: that her gifts weren't utilized to greater effect here feels like a waste. and she is in the movie for a total of maybe ten minutes. This is the title character around whom the entire marketing campaign was planned, played by a performer with buckets more charisma than the woefully miscast leading man. Rewatching Queen of the Damned 20 years later, e very scene that features Aaliyah vibrates with her presence, and it's impossible when watching the film to not mourn her loss-she was just 22 years old when she passed-but also question what the hell director Michael Rymer was thinking by not using her more. Fresh off her debut in the action movie Romeo Must Die, Akasha was a role the singer could really sink her teeth into. Most importantly, though, is the Aaliyah of it all. Sure, Townsend's Lestat is a cardboard cutout with cheekbones for days, but then there is Vincent Perez, who is clearly having a camp old time playing the ancient bloodsucker Marius as a kind of fussy gay uncle with a penchant for fine art. Queen of the Damned also understands at least a small part of what makes Rice's vampires so enduringly appealing: they are enormous drama queens. The soundtrack, firstly, remains an opus of nu-metal (written by Korn frontman Jonathan Davis) which gives the story a stylistic sensibility onto which it can cling. The visual effects were also incredulously bad, even for 2002, and have only worsened with time.īut still, there was just enough for my adolescent heart to latch onto, and I found myself responding to the same elements as a far snobbier adult. It is also an aggressively straight movie following on from Neil Jordan's lushly homoerotic Interview film, which gave us Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst as a dysfunctional queer family unit. Its pacing and structure are wildly uneven, a symptom of the screenwriters trying to shoehorn in the life story of Lestat from the novel The Vampire Lestat, which means we get a lot of monologuing from a charismatically challenged Townsend, leaving little room for the fantasy horror saga of The Queen of the Damned itself, which gets relegated to the final act. I recognized, even at the time, that this wasn't what you might call a "good" film. One gets the impression that this was a four-hour epic edited down to a polite 100 minutes. Hardly any of that matters, however, because their histories and motivations are nonexistent. At the same time, his music awakens Akasha (Aaliyah), the mother of all vampires.Ī dozen or so other important characters from the books are crammed into a handful of scenes, including paranormal archivist Jesse Reeves (Marguerite Moreau) who becomes enamored of Lestat, her mentor David Talbot (Paul McGann), and her mysterious aunt, Maharet (Lena Olin), whose origin story is linked to that of Akasha. While most of the world thinks this is a rockstar gimmick, his flagrancy irks the other undead, who plot to kill him. Ever the brat prince, the spirit of rock'n'roll speaks to Lestat's rebellious spirit, and he establishes himself as the frontman of a band, going public with his vampiric identity. The vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend), having grown bored of eternal life, goes to sleep for a hundred years, but is stirred from his rest by the music of a new era. What better time, I thought, to dust Queen of the Damned off and try again?Ī quick plot summary, for those who haven't ever seen it (and I cannot in good conscience say you should). The author passed away last year, shortly before AMC injected new blood into the Vampire Chronicles, re-adapting Interview With the Vampire as a critically acclaimed show. As spooky season approached this year, I started spending more and more time thinking about Anne Rice's legacy.
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